Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement,

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

This exciting change, made with consultation of the
KDE Free Qt Foundation, should encourage KDE and Qt use among commercial and proprietary developers and makes the philosophy of "Qt Everywhere" complete.

Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President of Devices at Nokia expands,

"By opening Qt’s licensing model and encouraging more contributions, Qt users will have more of a stake in the development of Qt, which will in turn encourage wider adoption."

The change in licensing for Qt is happening under the mantra "Qt
Everywhere" and is a step to remove any and all possible blocking objections
for not using Qt. Nokia explains further,

Qt will be available under the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt 4.5 release. Qt will also continue to be licensed under commercial license terms, as well as the GPL, version 3.0.

Nokia will also be opening up the development of Qt. A clear path for the
extension of external contributions is currently being built, including
publicly available source code repositories and access to the same level of
support, independent of the license.

The simple fact behind this is that Nokia is less reliant on the
income from Qt licensing than Trolltech (now Qt Software) was, and this has
given Qt Software more room to approach the market with more permissive
licensing strategies in order to increase adoption of the Qt toolkit.
This is part of the 10x growth target announced at last year's Akademy
to achieve ten times as many developers and ten times as many free software community users.
Or as KDE and Qt developer Thiago Maciera put it "we want KDE to be ten times as big".

While kdelibs has always been available under the LGPL, this marks the first
time that both Qt and kdelibs will both be available under the LGPL.
This will help make the licensing of KDE's libraries more permissive, flexible
and coherent. KDE's licensing is summarised on
href="http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Policies/Licensing_Policy">TechBase,
and can be described as "LGPL or equivalent for libraries, GPL otherwise".

Meanwhile, Nokia reiterates their commitment to a commercially viable and,
technology-wise, best-of-breed toolkit. In fact, the performance and
functionality improvements that can be seen in the upcoming Qt 4.5 release are
impressive. Running KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5 is already being tested by several
engineers inside Qt software, which has resulted in a number of bug fixes in
both KDE and Qt. Independent of the licensing changes, the KDE release team
plans to update the version of Qt in KDE's development tree (qt-copy) shortly
to snapshots of Qt 4.5 which is due to be released in March.

All-in-all today's news means tremendous things for Free and Open Source software. The
possibility of extending the reach of all of our work is exciting in and of
itself, and this announcement could lead to a veritable explosion of Qt and
KDE adoption.

"Shuttleworth: Well, I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of Qt. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That's very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.

Whether we'll be able to have the FSF excited about something, have GNOME excited about something, have Nokia excited about something which makes life better for developers - that's gonna be the interesting challenge for me. I'd like to see both desktops focusing on a common infrastructure. And we've already seen that, a lot of the Freedesktop initiatives have been embraced by both projects - HAL, d-bus for instance.

This also applies to other software projects, if you name your project g-something or k-something your are articulating a very specific user experience. Projects should really look to the whole Linux desktop and see how they can appeal to both sides."

It would make it easier for KDE and Gnome to share new breakthroughs in core underlying technology. Imagine if KDE and Gnome both utilized things like Solid and Phonon? What if they standardized on one underlying VFS/Kioslave technology, and yet allowed each desktop to provide their own UIs for it? The same goes for Kwallet, keyring, etc, etc. etc.

The actuall desktop environment can be completly different and follow it's own philosophie. There would even be the possibility to have even more desktop environments, like for example some intresting usability research projects - __but all besed on the same core technology__.

Did you notice the deafening silence that's currently benumbing the Gnome camp??

I think it is safe to assume that it's not because they're busy discussing how and where to start their "porting to Qt-4.5" work. They must still be crawling on the floor, searching their dropped jaws.

It is noticeable how, after 24 hours, not a single entry over at http://planet.gnome.org/ did comment about the Nokia license change for Qt-4.5. Neither positive nor negative....

I don't recall a huge amount of bloggage from KDE developers when GNOME announced 3.0. Most likely explanation for both occurrences: nobody particularly cares. Your whole post smacks of wishful thinking, to be honest.

Hmmm. It migt also be that Gnome 3.0 would have less of an possible influence on KDE and the KDE software stack than this could have on Gnome (if they want to). Gnome 3 isn't very ambitious and won't bring much new - it's just a much needed fixing of the issues they are having. Qt being LGPL on the other hand could bring them the opportunity of a huge improvement in their infrastructure and a revitalization of their development process (easier, faster toolkit).

Then again, you're probably just right, they don't see this as a serious option (despite technical advantages) and they don't really care...

Sorry to double-post, but perhaps a better example would be notifications.

Ubuntu has some new ideas for how notifications should be handled.

Ideally, every Linux app should able to use a standard API/call for notifications, and both Gnome and KDE should be able to pick up on this and handle notifications in an appropriate manner.

System trays apps also fall in this category. Gnome and KDE apps behave differently, when both should just provide a common call, and then let the Gnome or KDE session handle that call in the manner appropriate for that environment.

"every Linux app should able to use a standard API/call for notifications"

there's a D-Bus interface for visual notifications; we implemented a slight variation of it in 4.2 and hope to have a mutually agreed upon version in 4.3

"System trays apps also fall in this category."

this is a rather different sort of issue, really. in any case, we laid the foundation in 4.2 for fixing it properly, though, along the lines of what you wrote really. this is another 4.3 goal for plasma.

having one toolkit beneath both desktops would make this all slightly easier to accomplish, but only slightly. as long as there are also more than one possible desktop shell, it's still tricky.

I'm speechless. This was a totally unexpected move! This is so awesome I'm having a hard time finding words for it! Thank you, Nokia! If it was still 2008, this would have been the best news of 2008. :)

The GPL ensures that software using it is Free as well. The LGPL gives all the features away for free to proprietary software. [1]

While dual-licensing is already a debatable action, it still leads to wider adoption of free software licenses and at least provides its developers with funds by proprietary developers.
LGPLing removes both of these benefits. qt-development does not depend on these funds right now so that probably isnt an issue - as long as NOKIA stays commmited.
But the first is surely an issue. We will see many more smaller proprietary apps using Qt and KDE in future.

I have also thought about this. The why-not-lgpl document specifically says:

"Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library."

This case is true for Qt since there are alternative libraries, e.g. GTK.

No, it's a _reasoned_ essay (still waiting for your reasons) about an expert on the matter. The fact that you disagree with him, or that you consider him a "bitter man" doesn't mean you are right. You could be, or you could not. Of course if someone is quoting him is because he disagrees with you (and of course I do too).

You appear to be thinking of Slugworth - Wonka's competitor - and thinking like Slugworth, too, if labelling Stallman a zealot and considering his writings without reason is the thrust of your message. In fact, Stallman drives his critics up the wall precisely because his writing is typically well thought out, logically consistent, and because he is more often than not shown to be right on whatever issue is being discussed, long after the squeals of "zealot" have died down and those doing the squealing have gone off to admire the next shiny gadget, failing still to get the big picture.

Stallman is not logically consistent. Wikipedia used to have an early quote of his when he said he would never in good conscience ever agree to a software license.

He contends that freedom is only freedom so long as it consists of agreeing to a growing list of his preferred restrictions. Fewer restrictions is less free, and a different set of shackles is certainly not free.

He maintains that he isn't about ego, yet he fights people calling Linux, well Linux. He insists on calling it GNU/Linux, and drew a few mascots that feature a large, pronounce GNU mascot, and a much smaller Linux mascot.

We don't call it KDE/Linux, or Qt/Linux. We don't call it Adobe/Windows because it features some Adobe software.

Stallman also has said several times in the past that all software should be free in cost, and that it is a crime to charge for software, but later changed his tune and said programmers can be paid.

Stallman also thinks that hardware companies shouldn't have the right to protect their hardware.

He also said cloud computing was beyond idiotic.

I can't recall the last time I saw him make a single logical statement that he hasn't contradicted with another statement.

Furthermore, insisting that if I don't agree with Stallman, then I must be blind (without making any logical argument yourself) sure sounds like zealotry to me.

Wrong on so many accounts. Stallman has mentioned that drivers for graphics cards have some reason to remain proprietary when open sourcing the code would hurt them in business. Stallman has worked as a consultant for Intel.

He is and has always been very consistent in his views, and he has tried to convince people through reason. You may think that he's wacky if you don't agree with him,...well, ok, he is kind of wacky, but the GPL is what made Linux successful. I'm not sure if you've booted into a FreeBSD system, or even OpenSolaris, or whatever that runs X and has a gnome/kde desktop, but it's hard to tell when Linux isn't there. It would be much harder to have the same result if you took away all the GNU software.

It isn't a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. I'm a proponent of OSS. If you look hard enough, you'll see him contradict himself regularly. Furthermore, he lectures how companies like Google are evil for not supporting OSS enough. I'm not sure he understands who his allies are in the FOSS world.

And frankly, the argument that a growing list of restrictions is the very definition of freedom is far from logical. He blasted Ubuntu's attempt at a 100% free distro because it wasn't free enough.

He blasts open OSS licenses that he didn't write, because if they aren't his specific restrictions, then they don't fit the definition of freedom.

He blasts Firefox for allowing proprietary extensions, when Firefox is a program that opens many people's eyes to FOSS.

He blasts Microsoft when they open documents and standards for not doing enough.

I can't recall the last time I saw Stallman issue a statement, "I really like this group. I think they're doing some good work, and I endorse it" unless he is talking about the FSF and himself.

This "growing list of restrictions" that you keep bringing up is actually a bit misleading. I assume you are referring to the GPLv3 compared to GPLv2, but most of the additional "restrictions" are more like clarifications or closures of loopholes that people were using to get around the intent of the GPLv2.

The new sections that are more than just clarifications are mostly reactions to issues that weren't around fifteen years earlier.

I think you're a bit unclear in your thinking. See, Stallman has never been unclear as to WHAT freedoms he values most; he calls them "the four freedoms" and publishes them prominently on the FSF website.

When people, organizations, and companies grant these four freedoms, he does praise them. When they fail to do so, and insist on using terms like "free" or "open" anyway, he criticizes them (like your examples of Firefox and Microsoft). It's super-hyper-ultra consistent, to the chagrin of people who cannot think as clearly and precisely as he does.

Sometimes, such people--apparently including you--look at the road to those "four freedoms" as "restrictive." In fact, the "restrictions" the FSF imposes still preserve those four freedoms; they only "restrict" people from infringing on those four freedoms for other people. It's akin to saying the thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution "restricted" people from owning slaves, and therefore made the country "less free."

It's true only for utterly worthless definitions of the term "free." It exposes a grave misunderstanding and muddled thinking on the part of such a speaker/writer. In fact, it's just fundamentally wrong.

Firefox clears his list of the four freedoms, and yet he blasts them anyway.

Either you are 100% free, and you stop people from using proprietary extensions with your software or you aren't free at all.

And his version of freedom is a series of restrictions. Less restrictive licenses like BSD aren't free in his book.

He can't see the forest for the trees. He doesn't understand how other people an companies are furthering the FOSS movement, so he attacks them rather than works with them.

And frankly his zealotry turns off people, and hurts the FOSS movement. The GPL is a dirty word in many corporations. Even though we quietly use some FOSS software where I work, I was told explicitly by the suits that it is company policy not to install or use any GPL software, because they heard from somewhere that it is dangerous, and that the GPL stands against anything commercial.

And you, being--what exactly are you, here? Sincerely misinformed but educatable? A willfully-ignorant idiot? Dishonest out of maliciousness? You SHOULD already know that the suits, and your company policy, are factually incorrect and the FSF has refuted and debunked such idiocy for over a decade now.

If you're sincerely misinformed but educatable, you should go read the FSF website for the real scoop.

If you're a willfully-ignorant idiot, then there's nothing I can do for YOU, but I will point that out here so no one else ascribes more than entertainment value to your opinion.

If you're dishonest out of maliciousness, stop it. Here, too, I will point and loudly proclaim, "T. J. BRUMFIELD IS A BIG FAT LIAR! Everything he says about GNU/FSF vs. BSD is specifically designed to mislead! He's running a misinformation campaign to undermine all your hard work and progress toward free software!"

You write, again, "his version of freedom is a series of restrictions." I have already refuted that in my previous post: the four freedoms he champions, he does not restrict. He only seeks to restrict those who would infringe on those four freedoms of others. Again, I must repeat that this is like saying the thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution "is a series of restrictions" because it restricts people from owning slaves. Well, DUH, yeah, obviously it does, but only someone really, really stupid would think it results in a net loss of liberty.

You're convincing me you are such a person, because now you have ignored my refutation and gone back to reciting your articles of faith by rote. You have no intelligent refutation of how the four freedoms of the FSF are defended. You're just like some religious idiot sitting in a pew reciting John 3:16 over and over to try to keep yourself convinced.

You write, "...licenses like BSD aren't free in his book," which of course, to those of us who've read the FSF website, is patently, stupidly wrong. He lists the BSD license among those of true free-software licenses. It's not a COPYLEFT license, but then, you know that difference. Right? RIGHT?

Chant away, there zealot-boy. I'll keep pointing out your continual, repetitious, factually-incorrect posts as examples of how NOT to be. Thanks for serving as such a useful example.

"Pity the fool?" What are you, Mister T? I didn't see you arguing effectively there; in fact, calling us "fools" is essentially stooping to exactly that level.

If you believe Stallman's four freedoms should be adjoined by a fifth (the freedom to take away other people's four freedoms) then you need to argue effectively that doing so will result in greater freedom for everybody. This is impossible, which is why the FSF's official position, and the anti-slavery amendment, result in more people having more freedoms.

Now that's two of us arguing with you using constitutional similies, and you've responded by doing nothing more than hand-waving, name-calling, and ignoring the point to hope that someone will step in and simply delete the posts that dare to disagree with you.

Thanks for showing us the level of quality and defensibility of your opinion.

* In addition to being factually incorrect about the FSF's judgment of BSD licenses,

* In addition to using factually incorrect policies imposed by ignorant workplace managers,

* In addition to believing the oxymoronical saw that the freedom to TAKE AWAY others' freedoms results in being MORE FREE (go fig),

* In addition to falling back to repeating yourself like a liturgy without addressing refutations when challenged...

You now have to resort to cowardly begging others to delete comments that challenge your opinion? How embarrassing! If I was you, I would have shut up a long time ago and hoped that the obscurity of this message thread would hide my ignorance from anyone who wasn't a participant in it!

* In addition to being factually incorrect about the FSF's judgment of BSD licenses,

* In addition to using factually incorrect policies imposed by ignorant workplace managers,

* In addition to believing the oxymoronical saw that the freedom to TAKE AWAY others' freedoms results in being MORE FREE (go fig),

* In addition to falling back to repeating yourself like a liturgy without addressing refutations when challenged...

You now have to resort to cowardly begging others to delete comments that challenge your opinion? How embarrassing! If I was you, I would have shut up a long time ago and hoped that the obscurity of this message thread would hide my ignorance from anyone who wasn't a participant in it!

"He contends that freedom is only freedom so long as it consists of agreeing to a growing list of his preferred restrictions. Fewer restrictions is less free, and a different set of shackles is certainly not free."

One can argue about freedom from a number of perspectives, but Stallman has chosen his spot and stayed there. This doesn't make his view any less valid, even if some people would rather have more freedom for themselves and less freedom for, say, the end-user.

Indeed, Stallman's view of freedom is arguably a lot more balanced than those who seem to think that such privileges are just for developers, not users. Such people should read up on notions of freedom - Wikipedia is a good-enough primer - before trying to impress us with "amateur hour" arguments about the supposed disadvantage-free merits of permissive licensing.

"Furthermore, insisting that if I don't agree with Stallman, then I must be blind (without making any logical argument yourself) sure sounds like zealotry to me."

I noted that people liberally using the term "zealot" didn't get the "big picture": quite a different assertion to one which would claim that you are blind. Given such a feeble attempt at misrepresenting what I've written, can we really expect any more from you than the mere impression that you just don't agree with Stallman? Again, Stallman's policies (as opposed to random exchanges captured from discussions) stand up to a lot more scrutiny than the ridicule such policies elicit from his detractors.

The argument against Stallman's position can be reduced to its essence! This issue has nothing to do with copy left -- I have nothing against copy left as it applies to software which you have written and others have modified. The problem come with the restrictions on linking.

Suppose that I have a piece of GPL software which I have written and I want (or need) to link it to a standard library. The source code for this library is available free and I am allowed to distribute either unmodified or modified copies of it to anyone as long as I include a copy of the license.

Now, the question is, under the GPL, am I allowed to link this library to my GPL software and distribute copies of both the GPL software and the library together on the same disk?

"Suppose that I have a piece of GPL software which I have written and I want (or need) to link it to a standard library. The source code for this library is available free and I am allowed to distribute either unmodified or modified copies of it to anyone as long as I include a copy of the license."

So this "standard library" (although you presumably mean "popular" or "widespread") is available under a permissive licence...

"Now, the question is, under the GPL, am I allowed to link this library to my GPL software and distribute copies of both the GPL software and the library together on the same disk?"

Provided that the licence of the library is GPL-compatible, yes. If not, see this FAQ response: